Murray Pomerance - Böcker

Michelangelo Antonioni, who died in 2007, was one of cinema's greatest modernist filmmakers. The films in his black and white trilogy of the early 1960s - "L'avventura," "La Notte," "L'eclisse" -are justly celebrated for their influential, gorgeously austere style. But in this book, Murray Pomerance demonstrates why the color films that followed are, in fact, Antonioni's greatest works. Writing in an accessible style that evokes Antonioni's expansive use of space, Pomerance discusses "The Red Desert," "Blow-Up," "Professione: Reporter (The Passenger)," "Zabriskie Point," "Identification of a Woman," "The Mystery of Oberwald," "Beyond the Clouds," and "The Dangerous Thread of Things" to analyze the director's subtle and complex use of color. Infusing his open-ended inquiry with both scholarly and personal reflection, Pomerance evokes the full range of sensation, nuance, and equivocation that became Antonioni's signature.

With a sharp eye for social detail and the pressures of class inequality, Alfred Hitchcock brought to the American scene a perspicacity and analytical shrewdness unparalleled in American cinema. Murray Pomerance works from a basis in cultural analysis and a detailed knowledge of Alfred Hitchcock's films and production techniques to explore how America of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s is revealed and critically commented upon in Hitchcock's work. Alfred Hitchcock's America is full of stunning details that bring new light to Hitchcock's method and works. The American "spirit of place," is seen here in light of the titanic American personality, American values in a consumer age, social class and American social form, and the characteristic American marriage. The book’s analysis ranges across a wide array of films from Rebecca to Family Plot, and examines in depth the location sequences, characterological types, and complex social expectations that riddled American society while Hitchcock thrived there.

With a sharp eye for social detail and the pressures of class inequality, Alfred Hitchcock brought to the American scene a perspicacity and analytical shrewdness unparalleled in American cinema. Murray Pomerance works from a basis in cultural analysis and a detailed knowledge of Alfred Hitchcock's films and production techniques to explore how America of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s is revealed and critically commented upon in Hitchcock's work. Alfred Hitchcock's America is full of stunning details that bring new light to Hitchcock's method and works. The American "spirit of place," is seen here in light of the titanic American personality, American values in a consumer age, social class and American social form, and the characteristic American marriage. The book’s analysis ranges across a wide array of films from Rebecca to Family Plot, and examines in depth the location sequences, characterological types, and complex social expectations that riddled American society while Hitchcock thrived there.

George Cukor is one of the studio era’s most famous and admired directors, with many of the American cinema’s most beloved classics to his credit, including The Women, Gaslight, Adam’s Rib, A Star is Born, and My Fair Lady to his credit. Not himself a scriptwriter, he was particularly adept at choosing which properties to adapt and then managing the adaptation process with verve and effectiveness. What makes for a good adapter, for a talented master of ceremonies who knows where to put everything and everybody (including the camera)? Who knows how to make a property his own even while enhancing the value it has as belonging to someone else? The essays in this volume provide a series of complementary answers to those questions. Though many of his films are celebrated, Cukor has hitherto not received appropriate critical attention. Cukor’s interest in the various forms of indoor cinema lacked the generic focus of Ford’s westerns and Hitchcock’s thrillers. His style was theatricality writ large, a successful transference to the screen of what he had learned from his successful Broadway career, including the outsized, often flamboyant handling of emotionality. Yet Cukor was also a man of the cinema, fascinated by the ever-developing potentials of his adopted medium, as shown by the more than fifty films he directed in a career that endured from the early sound era into the 1970s.

Examines gender roles in contemporary foreign and Hollywood films amid changing social, political, cultural, and economic conditions.Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls examines the bizarre and fascinating range of gender portrayals in film at the end of the twentieth century. In order to view the screened face of gender in bold new ways, the contributors cover a wide variety of cinematic forms and styles-from the boy-girls of Hong Kong cinema to the on-screen modesty of post-revolutionary Iran to the New Hollywood's treatment of homosexuality, female power, and male intellectuality. Throughout, the works of important filmmakers are analyzed, including Ridley Scott, David Cronenberg, Jim Jarmusch, Woody Allen, Rakhshan Banietemad, Kathryn Bigelow, Bertrand Tavernier, Roman Polanski, and many others.

Examines gender roles in contemporary foreign and Hollywood films amid changing social, political, cultural, and economic conditions.Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls examines the bizarre and fascinating range of gender portrayals in film at the end of the twentieth century. In order to view the screened face of gender in bold new ways, the contributors cover a wide variety of cinematic forms and styles-from the boy-girls of Hong Kong cinema to the on-screen modesty of post-revolutionary Iran to the New Hollywood's treatment of homosexuality, female power, and male intellectuality. Throughout, the works of important filmmakers are analyzed, including Ridley Scott, David Cronenberg, Jim Jarmusch, Woody Allen, Rakhshan Banietemad, Kathryn Bigelow, Bertrand Tavernier, Roman Polanski, and many others.

Examines the many forms of cinematic "badness" over the past one hundred years, from Nosferatu to The Talented Mr. Ripley.Violence and corruption sell big, especially since the birth of action cinema, but even from cinema's earliest days, the public has been delighted to be stunned by screen representations of negativity in all its forms-evil, monstrosity, corruption, ugliness, villainy, and darkness. Bad examines the long line of thieves, rapists, varmints, codgers, dodgers, manipulators, exploiters, conmen, killers, vamps, liars, demons, cold-blooded megalomaniacs, and warmhearted flakes that populate cinematic narrative. From Nosferatu to The Talented Mr. Ripley, the contributors consider a wide range of genres and use a variety of critical approaches to examine evil, villainy, and immorality in twentieth-century film.

Examines the many forms of cinematic "badness" over the past one hundred years, from Nosferatu to The Talented Mr. Ripley.Violence and corruption sell big, especially since the birth of action cinema, but even from cinema's earliest days, the public has been delighted to be stunned by screen representations of negativity in all its forms-evil, monstrosity, corruption, ugliness, villainy, and darkness. Bad examines the long line of thieves, rapists, varmints, codgers, dodgers, manipulators, exploiters, conmen, killers, vamps, liars, demons, cold-blooded megalomaniacs, and warmhearted flakes that populate cinematic narrative. From Nosferatu to The Talented Mr. Ripley, the contributors consider a wide range of genres and use a variety of critical approaches to examine evil, villainy, and immorality in twentieth-century film.

The modern impulse gave us captivating technology and dark anxiety, rampant mobility and a world filled with strangers, the futuristic city and a fragmentation of experience. Motion pictures––the quintessence of modernism––entered into this cultural, technical, and philosophical richness with a vast public appeal and a jarring new vision of what life could be.In Cinema and Modernity, Murray Pomerance brings together new essays by seventeen leading scholars to explore the complexity of the essential connection between film and modernity. Among the many films considered are Detour, Shock Corridor, The Last Laugh, Experiment in Terror, The Great Dictator, Leave Her to Heaven, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Eyes Wide Shut, Sunrise, The Crowd, The Shape of Things to Come, The War of the Worlds, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Scarlet Street, Shadow of a Doubt, Stella Dallas, The Blue Angel, Sullivan’s Travels, and Catch Me If You Can.

New York, more than any other city, has held a special fascination for filmmakers and viewers. In every decade of Hollywood filmmaking, artists of the screen have fixated upon this fascinating place for its tensions and promises, dazzling illumination and fearsome darkness.The glittering skyscrapers of such films as On the Town have shadowed the characteristic seedy streets in which desperate, passionate stories have played out-as in Scandal Sheet and The Pawnbroker. In other films, the city is a cauldron of bright lights, technology, empire, egotism, fear, hunger, and change--the scenic epitome of America in the modern age.From Street Scene and Breakfast at Tiffany's to Rosemary's Baby, The Warriors, and 25th Hour, the sixteen essays in this book explore the cinematic representation of New York as a city of experience, as a locus of ideographic characters and spaces, as a city of moves and traps, and as a site of allurement and danger. Contributors consider the work of Woody Allen, Blake Edwards, Alfred Hitchcock, Gregory La Cava, Spike Lee, Sidney Lumet, Vincente Minnelli, Roman Polanski, Martin Scorsese, Andy Warhol, and numerous others.

What is most important about cinema is that we are alive with it. For all its dramatic, literary, political, sociological, and philosophical weight, film is ultimately an art that provokes, touches, and riddles the viewer through an image that transcends narrative and theory. In The Horse Who Drank the Sky, Murray Pomerance brings attention to the visceral dimension of movies and presents a new and unanticipated way of thinking about what happens when we watch them.By looking at point of view, the gaze, the voice from nowhere, diegesis and its discontents, ideology, the system of the apparatus, invisible editing, and the technique of overlapping sound, he argues that it is often the minuscule or transitional moments in motion pictures that penetrate most deeply into viewers' experiences. In films that include Rebel Without a Cause, Dead Man, Chinatown, The Graduate, North by Northwest, Dinner at Eight, Jaws, M, Stage Fright, Saturday Night Fever, The Band Wagon, The Bourne Identity, and dozens more, Pomerance invokes complexities that many of the best of critics have rarely tackled and opens a revealing view of some of the most astonishing moments in cinema.

In the 2000s, new technologies transformed the experiences of movie-going and movie-making, giving us the first generation of stars to be just as famous on the computer screen as on the silver screen.Shining in Shadows examines a wide range of Hollywood icons from a turbulent decade for the film industry and for America itself. Perhaps reflecting our own cultural fragmentation and uncertainty, Hollywood’s star personas sent mixed messages about Americans’ identities and ideals. Disheveled men-children like Will Ferrell and Jack Black shared the multiplex with debonair old-Hollywood standbys like George Clooney and Morgan Freeman. Iconic roles for women ranged from Renee Zellweger’s dithering romantics to Tina Fey’s neurotic professionals to Hilary Swank’s vulnerable boyish characters. And in this age of reality TV and TMZ, stars like Jennifer Aniston and “Brangelina” became more famous for their real-life romantic dramas-at the same time that former tabloid fixtures like Johnny Depp and Robert Downey Jr. reinvented themselves as dependable leading men. With a multigenerational, international cast of stars, this collection presents a fascinating composite portrait of Hollywood stardom today.

The Eyes Have It explores those rarified screen moments when viewers are confronted by sights that seem at once impossible and present, artificial and stimulating, illusory and definitive. Beginning with a penetrating study of five cornfield sequences-including The Wizard of Oz, Arizona Dream, and Signs-Murray Pomerance journeys through a vast array of cinematic moments, technical methods, and laborious collaborations from the 1930s to the 2000s to show how the viewer's experience of "reality" is put in context, challenged, and willfully engaged.Four meditations deal with “reality effects” from different philosophical and technical angles. “Vivid Rivals” assesses active participation and critical judgment in seeing effects with such works as Defiance, Cloverfield, Knowing, Thelma & Louise, and more. “The Two of Us” considers double placement and doubled experience with such films as The Prestige, Niagara, and A Stolen Life. “Being There” discusses cinematic performance and the problems of believability, highlighting such films as Gran Torino, The Manchurian Candidate, In Harm’s Way, and other films. “Fairy Land” explores the art of scenic backing, focusing on the fictional world of Brigadoon, which borrows from both hard-edged realism and evocative landscape painting.

There are hundreds of biographies of filmstars and dozens of scholarly works on acting in general. But what about the ephemeral yet indelible moments when, for a brief scene or even just a single shot, an actor’s performance triggers a visceral response in the viewer?  Moment of Action delves into the mysteries of screen performance, revealing both the acting techniques and the technical apparatuses that coalesce in an instant of cinematic alchemy to create movie gold. Considering a range of acting styles while examining films as varied as Bringing Up Baby, Psycho, The Red Shoes, Godzilla, and The Bourne Identity, Murray Pomerance traces the common dynamics that work to structure the complex relationship between the act of cinematic performance and its eventual perception.   Mining the spaces where subjective and objective analyses merge, Pomerance offers both a deeply personal account of film viewership and a detailed examination of the intuitive gestures, orchestrated movements, and backstage maneuvers that go into creating those phenomenal moments onscreen. Moment of Action takes us on an innovative exploration of the nexus at which the actor’s keen skills spark and kindle the audience’s receptive energies.

There are hundreds of biographies of filmstars and dozens of scholarly works on acting in general. But what about the ephemeral yet indelible moments when, for a brief scene or even just a single shot, an actor’s performance triggers a visceral response in the viewer?  Moment of Action delves into the mysteries of screen performance, revealing both the acting techniques and the technical apparatuses that coalesce in an instant of cinematic alchemy to create movie gold. Considering a range of acting styles while examining films as varied as Bringing Up Baby, Psycho, The Red Shoes, Godzilla, and The Bourne Identity, Murray Pomerance traces the common dynamics that work to structure the complex relationship between the act of cinematic performance and its eventual perception.   Mining the spaces where subjective and objective analyses merge, Pomerance offers both a deeply personal account of film viewership and a detailed examination of the intuitive gestures, orchestrated movements, and backstage maneuvers that go into creating those phenomenal moments onscreen. Moment of Action takes us on an innovative exploration of the nexus at which the actor’s keen skills spark and kindle the audience’s receptive energies.

Today’s film scholars draw from a dizzying range of theoretical perspectives-they’re just as likely to cite philosopher Gilles Deleuze as they are to quote classic film theorist AndrÉ Bazin. To students first encountering them, these theoretical lenses for viewing film can seem exhilarating, but also overwhelming.  Thinking in the Dark introduces readers to twenty-one key theorists whose work has made a great impact on film scholarship today, including Rudolf Arnheim, Sergei Eisenstein, Michel Foucault, Siegfried Kracauer, and Judith Butler. Rather than just discussing each theorist’s ideas in the abstract, the book shows how those concepts might be applied when interpreting specific films by including an analysis of both a classic film and a contemporary one. It thus demonstrates how theory can help us better appreciate films from all eras and genres: from Hugo to Vertigo, from City Lights to Sunset Blvd., and from Young Mr. Lincoln to A.I. and Wall-E.  The volume’s contributors are all experts on their chosen theorist’s work and, furthermore, are skilled at explaining that thinker’s key ideas and terms to readers who are not yet familiar with them. Thinking in the Dark is not only a valuable resource for teachers and students of film, it’s also a fun read, one that teaches us all how to view familiar films through new eyes.   Theorists examined in this volume are: Rudolf Arnheim, BÉla BalÁzs, Roland Barthes, AndrÉ Bazin, Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, Stanley Cavell, Michel Chion, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Douchet, Sergei Eisenstein, Jean Epstein, Michel Foucault, Siegfried Kracauer, Jacques Lacan, Vachel Lindsay, Christian Metz, Hugo MÜnsterberg, V. F. Perkins, Jacques RanciÈre, and Jean Rouch.

From ""The Wizard of Oz"" to ""Lolita"", from ""Heathers"" to ""Spice Girls - The Movie"", images of girlhood have been projected on the silver screen in myriad ways. Films have depicted society's problematic expectations of girls together with the dreams, anxieties and tensions experienced by girls themselves. In examining the construction of girlhood from many angles, this collection of essays attempts to capture the richness of meaning behind ""girl films"", but also explores the recent resurgence of youth-orientated cinema and the relationship of young female viewers to that medium. The 20 essays approach the construction of girlhood from a variety of perspectives, including reception, production, star images and textual analyses, while exploring such topics as star power, the Riot Grrrl movement, coming of age and loss of innocence. Among the characters given special attention are those in ""Gidget"", ""Crooklyn"", ""Titanic"", ""Freeway"" and ""Girls Town"". Written for general and academic readers, this work offers a livley discussion of gender in youth-orientated films.

The development of young masculine sexuality is still a cultural taboo of sorts, and until now there has been little scholarship available that discusses aspects of boyhood and its relation to cinema - in particular, the process whereby masculinities are socially, historically, economically, aesthetically, and psychologically created in male coming-of-age as depicted onscreen. Where the Boys Are, Cinemas of Masculinity and youth scrutinizes a broad corpus of films about boyhood within a cross-genre, trans-historical, cross-cultural framework. Unlike the filmic investigations before it, this book is not restricted to examining boys as agents of violence, aggression, and withdrawal; or as routinely glossed agents of romance or victims of comedic ridicule. Where the Boys Are is divided into three sections: Archetypes and Facades includes essays that examine historically central typifications of boyhood, the most accessible categories for seeing and understanding boy characters; essays in Bonds and Beautifications analyze the ways boys establish images of themselves and identify with one another in affiliation or love; and essays in Struggles and Redefinitions explore the way boys are depicted in film as aligning themselves in relation to people, forces, ideas, and situations. Using the most current and diverse critical methods, Where the Boys Are is a crucial resource for film scholars and students at any level, and is also the perfect companion to Gateward and Pomerance's Sugar, Spice, and Everything Nice. Cinemas of Girlhood (Wayne State University Press, 2002).

As studio bosses, directors, and actors, Jews have been heavily involved in film history and vitally involved in all aspects of film production. Yet Jewish characters have been represented onscreen in stereotypical and disturbing ways, while Jews have also helped to produce some of the most troubling stereotypes of people of colour in Hollywood film history. In Hollywood’s Chosen People: The Jewish Experience in American Cinema, leading scholars consider the complex relationship between Jews and the film industry, as Jews have helped to construct Hollywood’s vision of the American dream and American collective identity and have in turn been shaped by those representations. Editors Daniel Bernardi, Murray Pomerance, and Hava Tirosh-Samuelson introduce the volume with an overview of the history of Jews in American popular culture and the American film industry. Multidisciplinary contributors go on to discuss topics such as early Jewish films and directors, institutionalised anti-Semitism, Jewish identity and gossip culture, and issues of Jewish performance on film. Contributors draw on a diverse sampling of films, from representations of the Holocaust on film to screen comedy; filmmakers and writers, including David Mamet, George Cukor, Sidney Lumet, Edward Sloman, and Steven Spielberg; and stars, like Barbara Streisand, Adam Sandler, and Ben Stiller. The Jewish experience in American cinema reveals much about the degree to which Jews have been integrated into and contribute to the making of American popular film culture. Scholars of Jewish studies, film studies, American history, and American culture as well as anyone interested in film history will find this volume fascinating reading. Contributors: Daniel Bernardi, Vincent Brook, Wheeler Winston Dixon, Lucy Fischer, Lester D. Friedman, Sumiko Higashi, Sarah Kozloff, Peter Krämer, Murray Pomerance, Catherine Portuges, William Rothman, Vivian Sobchack, David Sterritt, Hava Tirosh-Samuelson

For critics, fans and scholars of drama and film, the laugh has traditionally been tied to comedy, indicating and expressing mirth, witty relief, joyous celebration, or arch and sarcastic parody. But strange, dark laughter that illuminates non-comedic, unfunny situations gets much less attention. In The Last Laugh: Strange Humors of Cinema, editor Murray Pomerance has assembled contributions from thirteen estimable scholars that address the strange laughter of cinema from varying intellectual perspectives and a wide range of sources. Contributors consider unusual humours in a variety of filmic settings, from the chilling unheard laughter of silent cinema to the ribald and mortal laughter in the work of Orson Welles; the vagaries and nuances of laughter in film noir to the eccentric laughter of science fiction. Essays also look at laughter in many different applications, from the subtle, underlying wit of the thriller Don't Look Now to the deeply provocative humour of experimental film and the unpredictable, shadowy, insightful and stunning laughter in such films as Black Swan, Henry Fool, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Kiss of Death, The Dark Knight, and A.I. Artificial Intelligence.The accessibly written, unique essays in The Last Laugh bring a new understanding to the delicate balance, unsettled tensions and fragility of human affairs depicted by strange humour in film. For scholars of film and readers who love cinema, these essays will be rich and playful inspiration.

The one thing everybody knows about Jerry Lewis is that he is beloved by the French, those incomprehensible hedonistic strangers across the sea. The French understand him, while in the U.S. he is at best a riddle, not one of us. Lewis is someone we take profound pleasure in excluding, if not ridiculing.Enfant Terrible! Jerry Lewis in American Film is the first comprehensive collection devoted to one of the most controversial and accomplished figures in twentieth-century American cinema. A veteran of virtually every form of show business, Lewis's performances onscreen and the motion pictures he has directed reveal significant filmmaking talents, and show him to be what he has called himself, a "total filmmaker." Yet his work has been frequently derided by American critics.This book challenges that easy reading by taking a more careful look at Lewis's considerable body of work onscreen in 16 diverse and penetrating essays. Turning to such films asThe Nutty Professor, The Ladies Man, The King of Comedy, The Delicate Delinquent, Living It Up, The Errand Boy, The Disorderly Orderly, Arizona Dream, and The Geisha Boy, the contributors address topics ranging from Lewis's on- and offscreen performances, the representations of disability in his films, and the European obsession with Lewis, to his relationship with Dean Martin and Lewis's masculinity. Far from an out of control hysteric, Enfant Terrible! instead reveals Jerry Lewis to be a meticulous master of performance with a keen sense of American culture and the contemporary world.Contributors include: Mikita Brottman, Scott Bukatman, David Desser, Leslie A. Fiedler, Craig Fischer, Lucy Fischer, Krin Gabbard, Barry Keith Grant, Andrew Horton, Susan Hunt, Frank Krutnik, Marcia Landy, Peter Lehman, Shawn Levy, Dana Polan, Murray Pomerance, and J. P. Telotte.

The one thing everybody knows about Jerry Lewis is that he is beloved by the French, those incomprehensible hedonistic strangers across the sea. The French understand him, while in the U.S. he is at best a riddle, not one of us. Lewis is someone we take profound pleasure in excluding, if not ridiculing.Enfant Terrible! Jerry Lewis in American Film is the first comprehensive collection devoted to one of the most controversial and accomplished figures in twentieth-century American cinema. A veteran of virtually every form of show business, Lewis's performances onscreen and the motion pictures he has directed reveal significant filmmaking talents, and show him to be what he has called himself, a "total filmmaker." Yet his work has been frequently derided by American critics.This book challenges that easy reading by taking a more careful look at Lewis's considerable body of work onscreen in 16 diverse and penetrating essays. Turning to such films asThe Nutty Professor, The Ladies Man, The King of Comedy, The Delicate Delinquent, Living It Up, The Errand Boy, The Disorderly Orderly, Arizona Dream, and The Geisha Boy, the contributors address topics ranging from Lewis's on- and offscreen performances, the representations of disability in his films, and the European obsession with Lewis, to his relationship with Dean Martin and Lewis's masculinity. Far from an out of control hysteric, Enfant Terrible! instead reveals Jerry Lewis to be a meticulous master of performance with a keen sense of American culture and the contemporary world.Contributors include: Mikita Brottman, Scott Bukatman, David Desser, Leslie A. Fiedler, Craig Fischer, Lucy Fischer, Krin Gabbard, Barry Keith Grant, Andrew Horton, Susan Hunt, Frank Krutnik, Marcia Landy, Peter Lehman, Shawn Levy, Dana Polan, Murray Pomerance, and J. P. Telotte.

George Cukor is one of the studio era’s most famous and admired directors, with many of the American cinema’s most beloved classics to his credit, including The Women, Gaslight, Adam’s Rib, A Star is Born, and My Fair Lady to his credit. Not himself a scriptwriter, he was particularly adept at choosing which properties to adapt and then managing the adaptation process with verve and effectiveness. What makes for a good adapter, for a talented master of ceremonies who knows where to put everything and everybody (including the camera)? Who knows how to make a property his own even while enhancing the value it has as belonging to someone else? The essays in this volume provide a series of complementary answers to those questions. Though many of his films are celebrated, Cukor has hitherto not received appropriate critical attention. Cukor’s interest in the various forms of indoor cinema lacked the generic focus of Ford’s westerns and Hitchcock’s thrillers. His style was theatricality writ large, a successful transference to the screen of what he had learned from his successful Broadway career, including the outsized, often flamboyant handling of emotionality. Yet Cukor was also a man of the cinema, fascinated by the ever-developing potentials of his adopted medium, as shown by the more than fifty films he directed in a career that endured from the early sound era into the 1970s.

Explores the director's repeated voyages into the dreamlike.A Dream of Hitchcock examines the recurring motif of the dream in Hitchcock's work-dreamscapes, dream processes, the dream effect-by focusing on close readings of six celebrated but often misinterpreted films: Strangers on a Train, Rebecca, Saboteur, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, and Family Plot. The Hitchcockian dream, as invoked here, is not so much a dream as it is a way of understanding, in its dramatic contexts, an "unearthly," irrational quality in the filmmaker's work. Rebecca revolves around problems of memory; To Catch a Thief around uncertainty; Saboteur around pungent aspiration; Family Plot around intuition; Rear Window around expansive imagination; and Strangers on a Train around delirious madness. All of these films enunciate the return of the past, the invocation of a boundary beyond which experience becomes unpredictable and uncertain, and the celebration of values that transcend narrative resolution. Murray Pomerance's distinctive method for thinking through Hitchcock's work allows these films to inform theorization, not the other way around. His original, provocative, and groundbreaking explorations point to the importance of fantasy, improbability, doubt disconcertion, hope, memory, intuition, and belief, through which the oneiric comes to the center of waking life.

Explores the director's repeated voyages into the dreamlike.A Dream of Hitchcock examines the recurring motif of the dream in Hitchcock's work-dreamscapes, dream processes, the dream effect-by focusing on close readings of six celebrated but often misinterpreted films: Strangers on a Train, Rebecca, Saboteur, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, and Family Plot. The Hitchcockian dream, as invoked here, is not so much a dream as it is a way of understanding, in its dramatic contexts, an "unearthly," irrational quality in the filmmaker's work. Rebecca revolves around problems of memory; To Catch a Thief around uncertainty; Saboteur around pungent aspiration; Family Plot around intuition; Rear Window around expansive imagination; and Strangers on a Train around delirious madness. All of these films enunciate the return of the past, the invocation of a boundary beyond which experience becomes unpredictable and uncertain, and the celebration of values that transcend narrative resolution. Murray Pomerance's distinctive method for thinking through Hitchcock's work allows these films to inform theorization, not the other way around. His original, provocative, and groundbreaking explorations point to the importance of fantasy, improbability, doubt disconcertion, hope, memory, intuition, and belief, through which the oneiric comes to the center of waking life.

Extensive meditations on the theme of the voyage in six Hitchcock films: Psycho, The 39 Steps, The Birds, Dial M for Murder, Rich and Strange, and Suspicion.Following from An Eye for Hitchcock and A Dream for Hitchcock, this third volume of reflections upon Alfred Hitchcock's work gives extensive meditations on six films: Psycho, The 39 Steps, The Birds, Dial M for Murder, Rich and Strange, and Suspicion. Murray Pomerance's sources come from a wide territory of interest, including production study, philosophy, cultural history, and more. The book is written as an homage to, and in many ways address to, not only the story content of these films but, more importantly, their overall filmic texture, which involves compositions, visual nuances, sounds, rhythms, and Hitchcock's unique treatments of human experience. The voyage theme plays a key-and moving-role in all the films discussed here.

Extensive meditations on the theme of the voyage in six Hitchcock films: Psycho, The 39 Steps, The Birds, Dial M for Murder, Rich and Strange, and Suspicion.Following from An Eye for Hitchcock and A Dream for Hitchcock, this third volume of reflections upon Alfred Hitchcock's work gives extensive meditations on six films: Psycho, The 39 Steps, The Birds, Dial M for Murder, Rich and Strange, and Suspicion. Murray Pomerance's sources come from a wide territory of interest, including production study, philosophy, cultural history, and more. The book is written as an homage to, and in many ways address to, not only the story content of these films but, more importantly, their overall filmic texture, which involves compositions, visual nuances, sounds, rhythms, and Hitchcock's unique treatments of human experience. The voyage theme plays a key-and moving-role in all the films discussed here.

Extensive meditations on silence in the films of Alfred Hitchcock.In A Silence from Hitchcock, Murray Pomerance explores the resonating power of silence in the director's work-its variation, its haunting temptation, and its technical power. Working from a meditative devotion to and an illuminating familiarity with the director's work, Pomerance shines light upon six films, some of them (Notorious, The Lady Vanishes, and The Trouble with Harry) frequently, even obsessively treated, and others (Frenzy, The Wrong Man, and Topaz) less often discussed. In its strange relation to speech, memory, urbanity, guilt, mortality, and espionage, silence becomes, in these films, a dramatic protagonist in its own right. Written by a master interpreter of Hitchcock, this book offers new ways of seeing, experiencing, and thinking about the films of one of cinema's greatest artists, as well as new ways of reflecting on our experience of cinema itself.